The Pocket Dictionary of Lacan: Essential Concepts of the Unconscious, Language, Desire and the Subject

Jacques Lacan changed psychoanalysis by asking how the unconscious speaks, how language divides the subject, and why desire cannot be completed by any final object.

The Pocket Dictionary of Lacan offers a precise, accessible map of one of the twentieth century's most influential and demanding bodies of thought. Written in clear American English, the book presents 225 alphabetized entries on the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real; mirror stage and ego; signifier and unconscious; need, demand, desire, fantasy, drive, object a, anxiety, and jouissance; neurosis, psychosis, and foreclosure; the four discourses; sexuation and the not-all; and the late topology of Borromean knot and sinthome.

Every entry combines definition, theoretical or historical context, cross-references, and a critical clinical note. The book explains rather than repeats Lacan's aphorisms: the phallus is not anatomy, symbolic castration is not injury, jouissance is not consent to suffering, and logical sexuation is not a gender test. Volume 6 of The Pocket Psychoanalysis Library from ABRAFP International Press.